Quote Originally Posted by Mishaela View Post
[Snip]For 1-cap crafting to not feel like a waste of time:

1) Gear upgrades have to feel like they're doing some good. If they don't make any real difference, there is no fun or point in upgrading. 1.x had this problem.

2) Similarly, leveling of all jobs has to be paced (including monster difficulty) to make gear upgrades worth stopping your leveling to obtain.

3) Crafting must remain a, if not the, primary means of getting useful gear at any level to make crafters feel needed. Having quests get you started with gear is great, but having quests supply you with gear from 1-cap deeply undermines the need for crafting at all. This, not the BoE/BoU concept itself, is why crafting in games like TERA and WoW is so uninteresting and largely treated as a chore to be completed to get access to one or two good recipes.

For level cap crafting to remain relevant:

1) The rate with which equipment and materia can leave circulation must be not too far from the rate at which they can be produced.

2) Multi-melds must remain competitive with non-crafted gear such as dungeon drops.

3) Materia need to be less permanent to balance out the fact that fewer trash materia will be brought into circulation. Also, crafters must obviously be able to multi-meld gear for another player without trading the item to them (which couldn't be done in 1.x).

4) Encounter design needs to be balanced to not require perfect gear but to be challenging enough to make players feel like a gear upgrade would help, and subsequently that effor needs to be rewarded eventually but not immediately.

5) Playerbase needs to stop thinking of melded gear as a monetary investment and see it for what it is: an expense of character progression. You can't always have your cake and eat it, too. What next, are you going to ask SE to build a time-machine into the game so that once you get your new dungeon drops you can go back in time and get back the time you spent on the dungeon gear you were wearing before? Time is money, friend.

If even one piece of this puzzle is left out or not fit in properly, the whole system may fall apart.[Snip]
I'm still personally against the BoU system because it is personally inconvenient to me, but that doesn't mean it can't be good for the game. You raise a lot of good points, particularly the concept of exponential increase in combat/crafting/gathering difficulty, making corresponding gear upgrades relevant before cap. If the issues you mention here are remedied in 2.0, I'll be much more supportive of the BoU system as a whole.

For now, I'll lament the inability to do secondary (and beyond) melds on friends' used gear and the inability to give away multi meld hand me downs (without rolling the dice a number of times before I can make that friend the new piece instead of the used item I was planning on giving them), but I feel that these are also systems that could be fixed with the more flexible server structure and other big changes we're expecting.

I'm still not about to cheer BoU on, but I'm willing to get used to it if the problems surrounding it are fixed.